Schelling proposed that payoff-irrelevant cues can affect the outcome of tacit bargaining games by creating focal points. Tests of this hypothesis have found that conflicts of interest between ...players inhibit focal-point reasoning. We investigate experimentally whether this effect is reduced if players have imperfect information about each other's payoffs. When players know only their own payoffs, they fail to ignore this information even though it cannot assist coordination; the effects of payoff-irrelevant cues on coordination success are small. When no exact information about payoffs is provided, payoff-irrelevant cues are more helpful, but not as much as when conflict is absent.
Using experimental data, we show that the characteristics of the joint production process have a notable impact on the distribution of bargaining agreements. The setting in which the jointly produced ...surplus is expressed to be proportional to individual inputs leads to significantly more proportional bargaining agreements. This is in contrast to the setting in which the surplus is expressed as an additive constant, where bargaining agreements are more in line with the Nash bargaining solution.
In response to the last recession, the European Union (EU) adopted a new economic governance (NEG) regime. An influential stream of EU social policy literature argues that there has been more ...emphasis on social objectives in the NEG regime in more recent years. This article shows that this is not the case. It does so through an in‐depth analysis of NEG prescriptions on wage, employment protection and collective bargaining policy in Germany, Italy, Ireland and Romania between 2009 and 2019. Our main conclusion is that the EU's interventions in these three industrial relations policy areas continue to be dominated by a liberalization agenda that is commodifying labour, albeit to a different degree across the uneven but nonetheless integrated European political economy. This finding is important, as countervailing transnational trade union action is the more likely, the more there is a common threat. Even so, our contextualized analysis also enables us to detect contradictions that could provide European labour movements opportunities to pursue countervailing action.
This paper studies trade in endogenously evolving markets exhibiting few traders at any given point in time. Traders arrive in the market and bargain until they complete a trade. We find that, unlike ...large markets, small markets feature trade delay and price dispersion, even when sellers and buyers are homogeneous and matching frictions are small. We characterize transaction prices as a function of the endogenous evolution of the market composition and economic conditions, providing several novel comparative statics results. Our analysis highlights the need to incorporate sub-market structures into the theoretical study of job, real estate, and rental markets, where trade opportunities are typically constrained by both the geographical location and individual characteristics of each trader.
What explains variability in norms of cooperation across organizations and cultures? One answer comes from the tendency of individuals to internalize typically successful behaviors as norms. ...Different institutional structures can cause different behavioral norms to be internalized. These norms are then carried over into atypical situations beyond the reach of the institution. Here, we experimentally demonstrate such spillovers. First, we immerse subjects in environments that do or do not support cooperation using repeated prisoner’s dilemmas. Afterwards, we measure their intrinsic prosociality in one-shot games. Subjects from environments that support cooperation are more prosocial, more likely to punish selfishness, and more trusting in general. Furthermore, these effects are most pronounced among subjects who use heuristics, suggesting that intuitive processes play a key role in the spillovers we observe. Our findings help to explain variation in one-shot anonymous cooperation, linking this intrinsically motivated prosociality to the externally imposed institutional rules experienced in other settings.
Data, as supplemental material, are available at
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2168
.
This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
Environmental bargaining in Australia Markey, Raymond; McIvor, Joseph
Journal of industrial relations,
02/2019, Volume:
61, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
An emerging body of research addresses the link between environmental issues, especially climate change, and employment relations. In this article, we examine the ways in which employment relations ...actors are addressing climate change, particularly focusing on collective bargaining. We begin by surveying the literature linking climate change and employment relations, especially analysing union strategies in this sphere, and develop a conceptual framework linking these threads. We then examine the incidence and content of collective enterprise bargaining over environmental issues in Australia for 2011–2016, applying and adapting Goods' concepts of embedded institutional and voluntary multilateral approaches. The former inserts environmental commitments into formal collective agreements; the latter involves unions and workers more directly in developing emissions-reduction activities in the workplace. We address the potential links between these and the different actors (unions or management) that drive them. We find that environmental clauses in Australian agreements are rare, and that they are as likely to be driven by management as by unions. The institutional, organisational, and particularly the regulatory environment seem responsible. However, exceptions – notably in universities – provide exemplars for substantial, class-based union agency. We also find that collective bargaining may facilitate more ongoing, strategic initiatives of the voluntary multilateral type.
Abstract
Sectoral contracts in many European countries set wage floors for different occupation groups. In addition, employers often pay a wage premium (or wage cushion) to individual workers. We use ...administrative data from Portugal, linked to collective bargaining agreements, to study the interactions between wage floors and wage cushions and quantify the impact of sectoral wage floors. Although wages exhibit a “spike” at the wage floor, a typical worker receives a 20% premium over the floor, with larger cushions for older- and better-educated workers and at higher-productivity firms. Cushions also allow wages to covary with firm-specific productivity, even within sectoral agreements. Contract negotiations tend to raise all wage floors proportionally, with increases that reflect average productivity growth among covered firms. As floors rise, however, cushions are compressed, leading to an average passthrough rate of about 50%. Finally, we use a series of counterfactual simulations to show that real wage reductions during the recent financial crisis arose through reductions in real wage floors, reductions in real cushions, and a re-allocation of workers to lower wage floors. Offsetting these effects was a rapid rise in education of new cohorts, which in the absence of other factors would have led to rising real wages.
•The shipping service competition is increasingly intensified.•The incentives and value of horizontal alliance are investigated.•A combined contract is considered.•Improved contract with compensation ...mechanism is proposed.
We investigate two competing carriers’ incentives of horizontal alliance and values of vertical cooperation in a one-to-two shipping service competition model, where two carriers may form an alliance. We find that forming alliances reduces carrier service competition, lowers port service price, and weakens port’s monopolistic advantage. Moreover, a combined contract is proposed that coordinates effectively and brings win-win situation for stakeholders, where carrier (alliance) shares profit with port meanwhile port allocates service cost in return. Also, we identify the contract has a certain robustness. Furthermore, we improve the contract with compensation mechanism by Nash bargaining for better operation.
We propose a new solution for coalition bargaining problems among n players that can form coalitions c generating heterogenous coalitional values ▪. The players' values vi and probability of ...coalition formation ▪ are given by: Display omitted where coalition c is chosen only if it maximizes the average gain ▪ and ▪. This solution is the strong Markov perfect equilibrium of a non-cooperative coalition bargaining game where players choose simultaneously the coalition they want to join followed by negotiations to split the surplus. The solution does not rely on the specification of a proposer recognition protocol. For majority voting games, the solution exhibits more inequality among the values of large and small parties and a concentrated equilibrium coalition formation distribution.
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